The term e-commerce or electronic commerce typically refers to transactions initiated and completed from a computer device connected to the Internet. The related terms m-commerce, meaning transactions initiated from a mobile telephonic device such as a smartphone, and t-commerce, meaning transactions initiated via television, are gaining currency. As in other networking technologies, the concepts of e-commerce, m-commerce, and t-commerce are convergent and the differences among the three are indistinct and variable except with reference to the type of device from which the transaction is initiated. Specifically, the Internet is involved in most t-commerce transactions, and the cellular cloud may be also.
To input credit card or other form of payment information to complete an electronic purchase can be cumbersome even on a fully-input-enabled device such as a personal computer. To validate the card information, one must supply the name as it appears on the card, the full billing address, the card number, the expiration date, and a security code from the reverse of the card. Many smaller e-commerce sites require that this input be re-entered for each new transaction to avoid the potential liability they would incur if they stored it persistently and the site security were subsequently compromised.
Large e-commerce sites such as AMAZON.COM permit regular users to create accounts and persistently store not one but several payment methods on the site. Doing this allows site customers to manage their purchases more flexibly and quickly. Customers access this stored information only after logging in via TLS (transport layer security) to a PKI (public key infrastructure) certified account, so the probability of a customer's account being hacked is reduced unless the customer uses a weak and obvious password. Most high-end e-commerce sites now police against this practice as well. Storing payment method information with many e-commerce sites has certain disadvantages to the consumer, which include a proliferation of accounts and difficult passwords to remember, or, if the consumer uses the same password for multiple accounts, a heightened security risk.
In the modern arena of multiple electronic media many holders of user account information now expose Application Program Interfaces (APIs) by means of which other online applications may, with user permission, access and share user profile information. An example of this is an on-line magazine, which allows users wishing to post comments on magazine articles to log in via FACEBOOK (a separate source of authentication and profile data). The poster provides only his email and password to authenticate his FACEBOOK account. The magazine then displays the authenticated comment with the poster's name, locale, and professional title (presuming that the user has not previously restricted access to those data via his FACEBOOK profile). FACEBOOK, in turn, publishes the comment to the poster's FACEBOOK community. Both applications, the magazine and FACEBOOK, benefit from enriched content. The poster benefits by not having had to create and maintain a separate profile with a separate username and password in order to post on a magazine read only occasionally.
Specifically, in the t-commerce world, where the user input device is often a handheld TV remote controller, providing payment method information to complete a purchase transaction is even more cumbersome. The device is adapted only for entering numeric data and selecting from simple menus via navigation and function keys. Creative solutions have been devised for allowing alphanumeric input by displaying keyboard images on the TV screen, but these do not lend themselves to rapid data entry; they only make alphanumeric entry possible with patience.